On 22 Jun 2011, at 22:02, Steve Alex wrote:
I'm still waiting for Object-Oriented 4D! Think that was what my
developer told me years ago would fix everything:-)
Steve
I think your developer has got his priorities wrong. There's nothing
magic about object oriented programming that will suddenly boost your
productivity.
Object oriented environments are 'nice' - especially when you're doing
low level development or writing games where you need to reproduce the
same alien on the screen 20 times with different behaviors.
But they're not so handy when it comes to writing high level objects
in business systems. The amount of redundant plumbing involved is
massive.
With well managed use of globals you can implement object based
architectures in 4D. They can be a lot more flexible than in many
object oriented environments simply because it's easier to evolve the
delineations between modules using naming conventions rather than
formally declared structures.
Postgresql is free and will run rings around 4D.
That's not really the point. Database engines are 10 a penny nowadays
and most applications use just a fraction of their capacity and
diversity. What matters is the completeness of the final solution.
That's the main reason many people chose 4D. None of the technologies
you mention represent a coherent development environment from top to
bottom - for a start they are all short of a either a front end or a
back end that has to be purchased from another vendor and 'welded' on.
Secondly, they all use SQL as the query language - that fact alone
justifies the use of 4D for me. On a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of
productivity, object oriented language rates about 2 whereas getting
away from SQL (which is a user interface, not a programming language)
rates about 9 IMHO.
Thirdly, (and what's relevant to this list) Active4D lets you have the
best of both worlds in that it faithfully implements 4D's unique
approach to programming database applications, while letting you do
almost anything a classic embedded scripting engine (like ASP or PHP)
can do.
why would you want to use 4D as a web server in the first place?
Because it means I don't need to think too much about web serving and
can get on with writing business logic. Again, the attraction isn't
necessarily technical supremacy, it's overall productivity which is a
very different thing.That is something that I'm afraid 4D still excels
at well beyond the technologies you cite IMHO, despite the various
gripes we may all have about the product or the company.
Peter
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